Propaganda in the corporate press and media is flying hot and heavy. www.prwatch.org is one good place to understand what the Media, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal and their confederates are doing now to shape the mind of the elites and other Americans. They do it by leaving out context to help us decide whether their conclusions are honest and true. As FOX News manager said, if we don’t report it, it never happened.
Don’t watch the news passively. It is better not to watch at all. I am spending more time reading the sports pages of the New York Times than ever. I stopped watching many of the news programs on MSNBC except for Olbermann and Maddow. O’Donnell showed his true conservatism when I left the TV on after Maddow while deciding what to do next. I turned the TV off and read.
The ten year 4 Trillion savings by the Commission co-chairmen is the amount of the tax cut that Republicans want to be permanent for the rich. In ten years it would cost us more than $4 Trillion because their income has gone up sharply while the bottom 90 percent wages stagnated or went down. The loss of revenues will be too much to make up so we will fall deeper into deficits where we will be using up half or more of the tax revenues to pay off loans to the rich here and all over the world.
The Wealth Class is now going into Hedge Funds again en masse. The top ONE PERCENT made more money than the bottom 50% of working American Families may with two jobs or more.
With the possibility of Republican control of both congress and the White House in 2012, we cannot continue the Bush tax cuts. Let them lapse now. At least the Republicans fight for what they want. Democrats just compromise!
Bush shipped 5 million jobs overseas, closed 50,000 manufacturing plants, doubled the increase in carbon dioxide, conducted two wars without paying for them which Nobel laureate Joseph Stieglitz calculated a total of 3 Trillion dollars or more when all costs are paid out, high subsidies to Big Pharma without paying for Medicare Part D, hired so many very highly paid contractors without any controls which increased the Pentagon budget at least 40 percent, corruption galore cost us unaccounted for billions of dollars, and I can guess, many things we still do not know about.
Peter Peterson, a Hedge Fund Billionaire has spent at least a decade trying to grab the riches of the Social Security Fund. The column below tells us exactly how they are trying to screw 95% of Americans who need fair Social Security and Medicare to survive.
Wall Street’s Money Trees are the American Working Class. Yes, all of us!
The news emphasized by the corporate press and media, even MSNBC, is “fairly” discussing the need for these cuts because Social Security will go under. Now Social Security is taking in more money than it can take out. Just a small adjusted just as making everyone pay rather than the poor middleclass for Social Security will fix it. They want to exclude a inflation factor. Just wages which will keep going down as we ship jobs overseas.
Medicare can make the simple adjustment of measuring the quality of the outcome of treatments rather than just paying for work done. We need to ration out the procedures of make money operations and treatments as delineated in Shannon Brownlee’s book Overtreatment of Medicare patients and decide what gets treated after age 75 which accounts for two-thirds of the cost of Medicare. Why do so many families who believe they will go to heaven not allow a comatose relative to die? Strange! I have talked to many nurses with my long live-saving stays in the hospital and they and I agree that we need to decide what and when treatment is futile.
Jim Kawakami, Nov 11, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
Published on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 by TalkingPointsMemo
The Wall Street TARP Gang Wants to Take Away Your Social Security
by Dean Baker
Just over two years ago, the Wall Streeters were running around Congress and the media saying that if they don't immediately get $700 billion the world will end. Since they own large chunks of both, they quickly got their money.
Even more important than the hundreds of billions of loans issued through the TARP was the trillions of dollars of loans and guarantees from the Fed and the FDIC. This money came with virtually no strings attached. It kept Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America and many others from collapsing.
As a result, folks like Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein are again pocketing tens of millions a year in wages and bonuses, instead of walking the unemployment lines. Instead, 15 million ordinary workers are being told to just get used to being unemployed; it's the "new normal."
But wait, it gets worse. The thing about Wall Streeters is that no matter how much money you give them, they always want more. Now they are using their political power and control over the media to attack Social Security.
This effort is being led by billionaire investment banker Peter Peterson. Mr. Peterson has personally profited to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from the "fund managers' tax subsidy," an obscure provision of the tax code that allows billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than schoolteachers and firefighters. However, Peterson believes in giving back. He has committed $1 billion to an effort that is intended to take away the Social Security benefits that people have worked and paid for.
As part of this effort, Peterson set up a whole new foundation, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He and/or his foundation created a "news service," the Fiscal Times, which is intended to promote the view that we have no choice but to cut Social Security. The Fiscal Times has entered into agreements with the Washington Post and other credible newspapers to provide material.
Peterson is also funding the creation of a high school curriculum which is intended to tell our children that the in the future the country will be too poor to finance Social Security. He funded a silly exercise called "America Speaks," which was supposed to convince an assembly of selected participants that we must cut Social Security after a daylong immersion in Peterson-style propaganda. (The people didn't buy it.) And now his crew is spending $20 million on an ad campaign to convince people the world will end if we don't cut Social Security. ... http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/10-2
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